Abstract:

The phoeniX RISC-V processor project was initiated in the summer of 2023 at the Electronics Research Center of Iran University of Science and Technology. Led by two academic research laboratories, Super Computing and Networking (SCaN) Research Lab and the Circuit Design Research Lab, the primary objective of this project is to design a foundational processor for architectural research and development especially for the emerging field and concept of approximate computing. While numerous open-source processors have been developed by universities, organizations and individuals on GitHub, many of them possess complex design and simulation processes that hold computer architecture researchers from finding a suitable foundation for their research endeavors.
Many of these cores do not meet the needs and have a huge lack of flexibility, in order to be changed and in the following case, supporting fundamentals and special features of approximate computing. The ultimate goal of this project is removing these complexities for developers and enthusiasts of different branches in computer architecture. In fact, phoeniX is a novel embedded hardware platform for integration of approximate arithmetic units with a RISC-V processor, designed for developers in order to implement and test their approximate units in a unified processor using standard compilers such as GCC, with minimum changes and effort, by following simple guidelines for setup and simulations.